China’s View of the State of the Union

In the State of the Union address, President Obama staked out a new rationale for reviving America’s industrious creativity: where he once argued that renewed innovation would combat recession, he has now framed the endeavor as an existential necessity in the face of urgent competition from abroad. We can call it the Clash of Innovations.

Obama made four explicit references to China—the most of any S.O.T.U. that I can recall—but he also made several other, more subtle, nods to China that are no less important in understanding where the real challenge does and does not lie. First, the explicit references: They served a keep-up-with-the-Joneses function, reminding Americans that China is now “home to the world’s largest private solar research facility and the world’s fastest computer.” Picking up on a theme that has become the mantra of American visitors to Beijing and Shanghai, he went on: “China is building faster trains and newer airports.” All of those are true statements, and, for good measure, he might have added that China doubled its wind-power capacity in 2006 and then doubled it again the next year, and the year after. Or that China had effectively no solar industry in 2003, and, five years later, it was manufacturing more solar cells than any other country.

In declaring this “our generation’s Sputnik moment,” he embraced a phrase that has moved steadily through the food chain of American discourse, from the woolly corners of think-tank analyses to Thomas Friedman’s exhortations, and now to the main stage of policy rhetoric. To understand how China has been able to make up so much ground so fast, it’s useful to know that, as I wrote last year, China had its own Sputnik moment—but it wasn’t recent. As far as I can tell, it was twenty-one years ago: March, 1986, when top Chinese scientists realized that decades of relentless focus on defense spending had crippled the country’s civilian scientific establishment. As a result, the government began pumping billions of dollars into labs and universities and experimental enterprises, on projects ranging from cloning to underwater robots. (In 2001, Chinese officials abruptly expanded one program in particular—energy technology—which helps explain why clean energy has gotten a head start in China.)

While those comparisons are sobering, there is another side of the Chinese innovation picture that is less imposing. As news broke today in China of Obama’s comparisons, there were was a bit of crowing from Chinese nationalists, but the more widespread reaction was simply disbelief. “China is still by no means a rival of America’s,” wrote a commenter at Sina.com. “I don’t see areas that should make us proud,” wrote another. Even at the reliably nationalistic Huanqiu site, commenters took note of Obama’s acknowledgement of American weakness: “What a contrast with China. Although the U.S. is strong, it is still looking for shortcomings,” one person wrote. Some of this just reflects a self-image that lags behind the pace of change in China, but it also speaks to a deep and credible Chinese concern that its education system and intellectual environment do not promote the kind of radical thinking that is needed for breakthrough innovation. Obama did not name China when he said, “Our students don’t just memorize equations, but answer questions like ‘What do you think of that idea? What would you change about the world? What do you want to be when you grow up?’ ” Likewise, he didn’t need to single out Beijing when he cited “some countries” in which “if the central government wants a railroad, they build a railroad, no matter how many homes get bulldozed. If they don’t want a bad story in the newspaper, it doesn’t get written.”

The connection that he did not make explicit is that governments that define what appears in the newspaper, or declare which homes get bulldozed without due process, struggle to go from producing solar panels that were invented abroad to imagining what the next generation of solar panels will look like in the first place. Three-quarters of Chinese companies conduct no research and development at all. In his new book, “Advantage,” Adam Segal of the Council on Foreign Relations makes a compelling case for the American edge in the “software” of innovation—the “politics, social relations, and institutions that move ideas from the lab to the marketplace.” He has a point, and it is by no means a reason to dismiss the President’s call to intellectual arms. China has awoken to the challenge of reviving its capacity for deep innovation, but that is a harder skill to acquire than simply replicating other ideas efficiently. The challenge for America is not to become more like China, but to become more like itself when it was at its best.

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